Colour Perception (and a request for help)

so i stuck this in braaaaiiiiins on the basis of the science of colour perception is a weird, manifold thing with roots in psych and language (among other things), and so is appropriate for a subforum on how people think.

i'm doing a small project on how people label food colours, and i'm looking for more participants. here's the link, and it takes less than five minutes to do. all you have to do is tell me what colour you'd call the pictured foods.

in return, um, have some interesting facts on colour perception:

- in the 1800's there were people who believed that the ancient greeks had less-developed colour vision than modern-day people, based off the limited number of colour words found in homer's works

- pretty much every language agrees on where red starts; it's where red ends and other colours start that's the tricky part

- different languages recognize different numbers of colours. english considers 'light blue' and 'dark blue' to be two aspects of the same colour, while russian considers them two different colours altogether. light blues are goluboy and dark blues are siniy.

- there was a study that attempted to discover the 'platonic ideal' of each colour run by berlin and kay in 1969, now referred to as the 'universalist view', but the relativist school of thought is still arguing with the validity of these results

- according to the universalist view, colour terms appear in a certain 'order' in languages. a language that has a word for green will not lack a word for red, but there can be a language that has 'red' without having 'green'.

 

Spoiler: DON'T LET MY PLANTLOVE BIAS YOUR RESPONSES

What on earth was that goooorgeous ruffle-leafed plant with the MANY SHADES OF PURPLE-LIKE COLORS and emerald undersides omg it was so pretty

 

I would be v interested to hear your results. V cool test.

 

@Lissiel once i've turned in my project i'll definitely post the results, and possibly a "best of" because ngl some of these answers made me laugh.

@itsAlana the only name i found for it was purple kale. i saw some yesterday when i was helping to clear a community garden for the winter, and apparently it keeps producing into december! very hardy stuff, considering how pretty it is.

 

From what I have learned about kale from this very forum, they're meant to be hardy winter-harvest crops anyways, so I believe it!

Also GOSH it's pretty.

 

^Yup, Kale is very definitely a winter thing :)

 

I'm always a sucker for surveys about colors.

 

I'd definitely be interested in seeing what your results look like! I am a huge dork for perceptual psychology and the like so this kind of stuff is really interesting to me.

 

Took it! Mind if I spread the research around elsewhere?

At some point in the last ~5 years of art education I apparently lost most of my 'fancy' words for colors. Ended up describing everything in combinations of one-syllable color words. (Lol that's probably enough to tell you which survey is mine...)

 

(one of the weird ones could be mine. For reference I am ESL, so that might be why some get called weird description-ish things with a sprinkling of hella fancy words in between. Because color words are horrible)

 

@Ben the more responses the merrier! thank you for even asking

@IvyLB i honestly don't know why it didn't occur to me to ask about esl speakers. i'm going to add that in asap

Spoiler: in case someone doesn't want this biasing their answers?

however, the answer that made me laugh was "eridan purple" for the colour of the carrots.

 

also thank you so much to everyone who's participated. every time i see the number of participants go up i get a little ! of happiness.

 

Oh nooo you included those icky red-brown-green tomatoes. I legit have no word for that color, only hatred.

 

Oh, hey, this is cool! Whenever I hear stuff about color perception it's always interesting. I added my responses; I hope they help.

 

I love those tomatoes! They are so tasty.

 

I LOVE THEM SO MUCH FAVORITE TOMATOES

Spoiler: oops i know things

they are also literally called 'black' tomatoes so there ya go. That's what the color is called. Black.

 

Spoiler: But

but that's not black. That's too light to be black.



I am mostly joking, as part of the fun of this is seeing what different terminology people use for the same images. I just... Somtimes... Damn you, relative color words!!!

 

They're black the same way black flowers are black, which is to say, motherfucking not. >:(

 

Goths everywhere are disappointed that nature rejects representing their aesthetic in flowers.